with international law for a State to be in compliance with its international obligations, notably in relation to legitimate grounds for affording different treatment to nationals and non-nationals. Municipal law may also legitimately distinguish between different categories of nationals by conferring certain rights and obligations upon some nationals but not others. Obvious examples concern the right to vote and the obligation of military service, which are usually reserved for nationals who are adults. In some countries, such a distinction may be drawn by providing that certain nationals are “citizens” whereas other nationals are not.124 When used in this sense, the term “citizen” has a different meaning than the term “national”, and thus it is important to note that whether the terms “national” and “citizen” are synonymous or not depends upon the context in which they are being used.125 De facto statelessness The question raised at the end of section 5 above is whether persons who do not enjoy the rights attached to their nationality may be considered de facto stateless.126 124 125 126 rights and obligations which are attached to the possession of the nationality of that country”. Consider in particular the case of the Volksdeutsche, as provided for in Article 116(1) of the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany: “Unless otherwise provided by a law, a German within the meaning of this Basic Law is a person who possesses German citizenship or who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries of December 31, 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person.” See, for example, Article 36 of the Constitution of Honduras: “Son ciudadanos todos los hondureños mayores de dieciocho años.” See, more generally, the discussion in Weis, “Nationality amd Statelessness in International Law”, op. cit., at pp. 3 - 7; Jennings and Watts (eds), “Oppenheim’s International Law”, 9th edition, 1992, Volume 1, Parts 2 to 4, p. 856: “In general, it matters not, as far as international law is concerned, that a state’s internal laws may distinguish between different kinds of nationals – for instance, those who enjoy full political rights, and are on that account named citizens, and those who are less favoured, and are on that account not named citizens”; Cordova, footnote 39 above, para. 32: “The Special Rapporteur thinks that nationality does not, by itself, include the status of citizenship. A citizen is a national who enjoys political rights; but there are many nationals who are not citizens in the sense that they do not enjoy political rights. That is the case with minors in all countries and, in some of them, with women, the mentally incapacitated and convicted criminals.” Cordova’s example of women is of course incompatible with international human rights law, which has developed significantly since when he was writing in 1954. The meaning of the terms “citizen” and “national” may differ in other contexts as well, such as the concepts of “EU citizen” and “British Overseas Citizen”. However, a full discussion of such distinctions is outside the scope of the present paper. A typical scenario under which nationals may in practice be denied a broad range of rights is if they are unable to obtain national identity documents. Possession of such a document may be the sine qua non for the exercise of a wide range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. For example, the European Court of Human Rights found in 2003 that the denial of the issuance of an internal passport by the Russian Federation constituted an interference with the right to respect for private life, noting inter alia that: “in their everyday life Russian citizens have to prove their identity unusually often, even when performing such mundane tasks as exchanging currency or buying train tickets. The internal passport is also required for more crucial needs, for example, finding employment or receiving medical care” (European Court of Human Rights, Case of Smirnova v. Russia, Application No.’s 46133/99 and 48183/99, Judgement of 24 October 2003 (final), para. 97). Note in general that there can be many reasons why a person may be unable to obtain an identity document. For example, in Egypt, Baha’is and certain other nationals have been unable to obtain birth certificates, identity cards, marriage certificates, death certificates and other vital records because the government requires all such documents to list religious affiliation and restricts the choice of religion to the three officially recognized religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Many persons have been unable to obtain identification papers because they refuse to lie about their religious affiliation and have been denied the possibility on leaving the entry about religious affiliation blank. They have accordingly been denied enjoyment of a wide range of rights, such as access to employment, 36